Inside the Creepy ‘Haunted’ Los Angeles Nightclub Where a Ghostly Woman ‘Floated’ Across the Dance Floor

People Kept Seeing and Hearing Things Inside El Leon de Oro

Some Halloween stories belong to folklore. Some belong to history. El Leon de Oro somehow belongs to both.

My grandfather, Leonardo Miranda Calderón, owned and operated the Boyle Heights Mexican bar and nightclub for years. Long before I knew anything about the building’s documented history, I knew that people in my family believed something strange lived alongside us there.

There was the mysterious woman relatives said appeared inside the club in what I remembered as a fairy-like costume — though looking back, it may have been more like a dancer’s or performer’s outfit. There was the person I thought I saw sleeping in an upstairs room after my grandfather died. Decades earlier, artist Frank Romero preserved a Boyle Heights ghost story about a beautiful woman who seemed to float across the very same dance floor. And years after my family left, employees working inside what had become Los Angeles City Councilman José Huizar’s temporary Council District 14 field office reported knocking, bells, alarms, furniture scraping across an empty room and the apparition of a man in a cowboy hat.

None of those accounts proves the building was haunted. They do not all describe the same figure, and I do not want to force separate memories into one neat supernatural explanation.

But the thing that keeps pulling me back is simpler: people from different generations, with no connection to one another, kept reporting that they saw or heard things inside this building that they could not explain.

The Mysterious Woman in the Dancer-Like Costume

The first ghost of El Leon de Oro I ever knew about was a woman.

Family members described an apparition that would appear inside the nightclub wearing some kind of dancer-like or theatrical costume. As a kid, I remembered it in my head as something almost fairy-like. Looking back now, I think that may have been my younger brain translating an old performance costume into the closest image I understood.

I never knew her name, if she had one, or whether anyone in the family connected her to a specific person or event. I also cannot say whether she had actually been a dancer at El Leon de Oro. That possibility makes sense in a nightclub setting, but it remains a possibility, not something I can document.

What survived in the family story was the image of a woman appearing inside the club where she should not have been.

For years I treated that as exactly what it was: one of our family’s old stories about the nightclub.

Then I found another story about a mysterious woman in the same ballroom — one that had been told long before my family ever operated El Leon de Oro.

The Beautiful Woman Who Seemed to Float Across the Dance Floor

In 1997, pioneering Chicano artist Frank Romero sat for an oral-history interview with Jeffrey Rangel for the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art. Romero grew up in Boyle Heights and had a very personal connection to the building: his grandfather lived on State Street directly behind the ballroom.

The Smithsonian transcript renders the ballroom name in several ways, but a 1947 Los Angeles telephone directory identifies Pontrelli’s Ball Room & Restaurant at 1866 E. 1st Street. Romero identified that old ballroom as the place that later became El Leon de Oro.

Then Romero tells the story.

He said a woman he knew, Señora Lechuga, had told him what her brother experienced at Pontrelli’s during the World War II era, in the early-to-mid 1940s. One night, an exceptionally beautiful woman appeared at the dance hall. Men wanted to dance with her, and according to the story, when she crossed the floor she seemed almost to float.

One man became captivated by her. At the end of the night he took her home. Because she was cold, he lent her his coat before leaving her at a house near Evergreen Cemetery — roughly a mile east of Pontrelli’s along the First Street corridor.

That short journey is easier to understand if you picture Boyle Heights before the freeway network that now cuts through and encloses so much of the neighborhood. In the World War II era, First Street ran through a more continuous street-level community. Major freeway construction would reshape Boyle Heights from the 1940s through the 1960s, displacing residents and breaking the neighborhood into sections.

The next day he returned to the house looking for her.

The woman who answered the door told him there had to be some mistake. The daughter he was describing had been dead for a year.

According to the story Romero preserved, the mother eventually took the man across to Evergreen Cemetery. When they reached the daughter’s grave, the coat he had lent the mysterious woman the night before was there.

Romero understood these kinds of stories as barrio folklore and oral tradition. He even talked about wanting to paint what he called The Ghost of Petrolly’s Barroom. He was not claiming the story proved a supernatural event took place.

But finding that account decades later stopped me cold. My family’s woman and Romero’s woman are not described the same way, and there is no reason to declare them the same apparition. What they share is the room.

Two different generations remembered a mysterious woman appearing inside the same old Boyle Heights ballroom.

The Day I Opened the Door Upstairs

My own experience happened after my grandfather’s death in the mid-1990s.

El Leon de Oro had closed, and I was inside the building with my uncle. There had always been talk that my grandfather might have hidden or stashed cash somewhere in the property, so we were going through rooms and tucked-away spaces looking for anything he might have left behind.

I never found any money.

But at the very top rear portion of the building, behind a narrow balcony overlooking the old dance floor, there was a makeshift bedroom area.

I opened the door.

And I saw what looked like someone sleeping in the bed.

I did not stand there trying to figure out who it was. I closed the door almost immediately and went downstairs.

I told my uncle somebody was upstairs.

He told me that was impossible.

We were the only people in the building.

I never went back up to check.

Could I have mistaken blankets, furniture or shadows for a person in a dim room? Of course. Memory is imperfect, and an old, empty nightclub is exactly the kind of environment where your eyes can turn an ordinary shape into something else.

I can only tell you what I remember: I opened that door believing I was about to find an empty room, saw what looked like a person asleep in the bed, shut it again and did not go back.

Then José Huizar’s Field Office Started Hearing Things Too

This is where the story stops being only family memory and old Boyle Heights folklore.

Years after El Leon de Oro closed, part of the property at First and State became a temporary field office for then-Los Angeles City Councilman José Huizar and Council District 14. In 2013, The Daily Beast reported that staff working there had begun experiencing strange activity almost as soon as they moved in. Patch later picked up the story under the headline Huizar’s Staff Calls Ghost Hunter After Strange Happenings in Field Office.

The published accounts do not quote Huizar himself describing the haunting. The people who went on record were members of his staff and LAPD Sgt. Miguel Lopez, who investigated paranormal reports in his personal time. That distinction matters.

Huizar’s administrative assistant, Hilda Carrillo, said staff initially tried to explain away what was happening. The building was old. Maybe it was the air conditioning. Maybe the noises had a normal source.

But according to Carrillo, it kept happening.

Staff reported unexplained knocking, bells ringing and the fire-alarm system going off. Carrillo said there were also times people inside felt woozy.

Then came one of the strangest mornings.

Carrillo said she arrived early and heard what sounded like tables and chairs being dragged around upstairs. The noise continued for roughly 15 minutes. Later, when she asked the building owner why someone had been moving furniture so early, she said he told her he had only just arrived and had not been upstairs.

That detail hits differently knowing what the upstairs room had been for generations: the ballroom, the main dance floor, the same hall tied to Romero’s floating-woman story and the same room my family knew above the El Leon de Oro cocktail lounge.

The Cleaner Said She Came Face-to-Face With a Man

Another employee reportedly saw something rather than simply hearing it.

According to Carrillo’s account, a member of the cleaning staff was vacuuming when she saw a pair of feet. She looked upward and found herself facing the figure of a man.

She described him as a handsome Hispanic man in his 50s wearing a cowboy hat, brown coat and jeans.

Staff developed their own theory that the figure might somehow be connected to El Leon de Oro’s nightclub years. That was speculation. No specific death matching the apparition has been established.

But the reports were taken seriously enough that LAPD Sgt. Miguel Lopez was brought in. Lopez was a police officer who, on his own time, investigated reports of paranormal activity.

Lopez tried to look for ordinary explanations first. Of the cowboy-hatted figure, however, he told The Daily Beast: “I couldn’t explain the man.”

Lopez and others carried out what was described as a cleansing of the office. Carrillo later said the strange activity quieted down afterward.

That does not prove a ghost was removed from the building. What it does establish is that years after El Leon de Oro closed, people with no connection to my family were still describing unexplained activity inside the same property.

Four Haunting Threads, One Boyle Heights Ballroom

That is the part of this story I keep coming back to.

There is the wartime story preserved by Frank Romero: the beautiful woman at Pontrelli’s who seemed to float while she danced, only for a man to learn the next day that the woman he believed he had taken home had already been dead for a year.

There is the story I grew up with: the mysterious woman in what my younger memory interpreted as a fairy-like costume, but which may have been some kind of dancer’s or performer’s outfit.

There is my own memory of opening a door after my grandfather’s death and seeing what looked like a person asleep in an upstairs room when my uncle and I believed we were the only people inside.

And then there are Huizar’s field-office employees: the knocking, bells, alarms, the sound of furniture being dragged around an empty upper floor and the cleaner’s encounter with the man in the cowboy hat.

Those stories do not perfectly match.

That is precisely why I do not want to force them into one tidy legend.

Maybe they are coincidences. Maybe old buildings invite old stories. Maybe a century of dances, performances, family gatherings, fights, celebrations, tragedies and changing neighborhoods gives people enough material to keep ghosts alive without anything supernatural ever taking place.

Or maybe there are things about that building none of us ever understood.

The Ballroom Was Already Old Before El Leon de Oro

The building stands at the southwest corner of East 1st and State streets in Boyle Heights. Different portions of the same historic structure have appeared in records under 1866, 1868 and 1870 E. 1st Street, Los Angeles, CA 90033.

According to the Angels Walk Boyle Heights Guidebook, John Korbel arrived in Boyle Heights in 1882 and opened his first bakery four years later. He eventually built the two-story brick Korbel Block at First and State.

The ground floor held commercial spaces, including the Korbel Bakery, while a spacious ballroom with a stage and electric lighting occupied the second floor. Korbel opened the hall with an invitation-only New Year’s Eve celebration in 1891.

The hall hosted music recitals, theatrical productions, civic meetings and visiting speakers. Over the decades it continued as an entertainment space under other names, including Pontrelli’s Ballroom.

That is the same upstairs ballroom remembered in Romero’s ghost story and, generations later, transformed into the main dance floor of El Leon de Oro.

By the El Leon de Oro years, the building worked on two distinct levels. The ground floor was the bar and cocktail lounge. Upstairs was the main dance floor and hall. The upper level still carried pieces of the old architecture: exposed curved wood, balcony railings and tucked-away rooms above the floor that I remember from childhood.

Pontrelli’s Ballroom Had Seen Real Violence Too

The building’s history was not limited to dancing and ghost stories.

During the Zoot Suit Riots of June 1943, groups of U.S. servicemen roamed Los Angeles attacking Mexican American youths and other young people associated with zoot-suit culture. Historical reporting places one confrontation at Pontrelli’s Ballroom at First and State, where young men who had gone dancing were attacked, beaten and stripped of their clothing.

That is real documented violence, and it should not be turned into supernatural decoration. There is no evidence tying those attacks to any later apparition.

What it does tell us is that before El Leon de Oro ever opened, this ballroom had already witnessed generations of celebration, conflict, fear and change.

After El Leon de Oro, the Building Kept Changing

My grandfather Leonardo Miranda Calderón died after suffering a heart attack while at El Leon de Oro in the mid-1990s. The nightclub closed after his death.

My family remembers my grandmother wanting nothing more to do with the property. The building was sold to a woman who opened a church inside the former nightclub. According to our family recollection, the church did not last and the property later went into foreclosure.

Los Angeles building records support the church chapter: a later permit describes the first floor at 1870 E. 1st Street as a “church and office”, while the upper portion at 1866 E. 1st Street was still described as a dance hall.

City records also make one later chapter clear. By 2010, the property was being used by Council District 14 as its Boyle Heights District Office. By 2013, contemporary reporting described it as José Huizar’s temporary field office — the same office where Carrillo and other workers said the strange activity occurred.

Today, the Old Ballroom Is Housing

The building has now entered another life. The historic shell remains, but the interior my family knew was gutted and rebuilt through adaptive reuse. Los Angeles building records show the former second-floor dance hall and a newly created third level being converted into apartments; a later revision expanded the project to 15 apartment units. The permit was finalized in July 2026 and a certificate of occupancy was issued.

The downstairs cocktail lounge, the upstairs dance floor, the balcony and the little room where I opened that door are no longer the spaces my family knew.

But after everything that has been reported there, one question feels almost too perfect to avoid:

If anything really was haunting that building, did gutting the interior make it leave — or do the stories simply have new rooms now?

Did You Ever See Something at El Leon de Oro?

If you danced at El Leon de Oro, stopped in for a drink downstairs, remember Pontrelli’s Ballroom, worked in José Huizar’s field office, lived nearby — or ever experienced something there that you still cannot explain — we want to hear what you witnessed in the comments.

Especially if you remember the woman, heard stories about a dancer or performer, saw the man in the cowboy hat, experienced unexplained noises upstairs, or knew another version of the building’s ghost stories. Dates, names, photographs and family memories are welcome.

Source Note: This story combines documented Boyle Heights history with first-person family recollections from INYIM co-founder Victor Lerma Jr. Lerma’s account of his grandfather Leonardo Miranda Calderón, the El Leon de Oro floor layout, the family story of the mysterious woman in a dancer-like or theatrical costume, the post-club church/foreclosure period, the later interior gutting and Lerma’s own experience inside the former nightclub are identified as family or personal recollections where independent records have not yet been located. Frank Romero’s Pontrelli’s ghost story is preserved in his 1997 Smithsonian oral-history interview and is presented as folklore rather than proof of a paranormal event. The 2013 Daily Beast and Patch reports identify the property as José Huizar’s temporary field office and attribute the paranormal claims to staff members and LAPD Sgt. Miguel Lopez; neither report quotes Huizar himself discussing the alleged haunting. Los Angeles records independently document later church-and-office use, the Council District 14 office and the building’s 2026 completion as a 15-unit adaptive-reuse apartment property. Illustrations accompanying this feature, including the Pontrelli’s-to-Evergreen route map, are historical visualizations and are identified as such. Los Angeles City Planning provides the freeway-era context used to describe the neighborhood’s later physical fragmentation.